Face of lawlessness
Acceleration Program, smuggling, fishy government contracts, or environmentally damaging extractive industries. The latest victim is an 18-year- old medical student whose family owns a small bakeshop. Yes, a small bakeshop that has no semblance of a chic pastry shop whose owner could be a movie starlet or a politician’s mistress.
The average retrieval cost — a.k.a. ransom — is P150,000. But isn’t this atrociously stupid? A kidnapper does not act alone. For the snatch, there is a vehicle, a driver, a lookout and probably other vehicles and drivers. There logically is a “safehouse” with rental and maintenance cost or perhaps a family subcontracted to take charge of “board and lodging” while negotiations are being conducted. Then you have a negotiator with several cellphones, or more efficiently a phone with two SIM slots. He too needs a house or a hotel room and some cash to spend time on coffee or beer while talking to the family of the victim.
Assuming there are 10 people in the scheme, the per capita take is P15,000. It is baffling to think that for P15,000, someone would put himself at risk of capture, life imprisonment or possible death; and worse, for P15,000 putting another person’s life, reputation and future in harm’s way.
The P150,000 could have assured the girl at least a semester of tuition and allowances to pursue her medical education. If used elsewhere, it could have funded at least three transitional homes for the victims of the Yolanda or Zamboanga disasters where the government is procrastinating on its promises of rehabilitation and recovery.
But here’s the rub. In the Constitution, it is the sworn obligation of the State to protect its citizens, part of the social contract in exchange for collecting taxes. The national budget this year has breached the trillionpeso mark, a financial resource that enhances the coercive authority of the State. But why is the State absent when bad things happen to citizens? It is mind-boggling trying to comprehend why kidnappers seem to irrationally choose low benefits versus high costs. You may call them stupid for that. But how do you portray a State that allows lawlessness to thrive?
A friend of mine says the kidnappers are not really stupid. They know their economics. When the state is failing, the possibility of capture, imprisonment or death can be downgraded, or even deleted, from the assumptions. The benefit of lawlessness goes higher than the cost of behaving like an obedient citizen. I take pity on the marginalized ones, the “trisikad” drivers who religiously pay the P600 license and car plate. They don’t earn P150,000 for a year’s allegiance to the State. They earn a meager P5 per trip, probably P100 for a day’s lawful use of hands and feet.